Amazing code density

31 May 2014

Take a look at this very brief demo. You might be thinking it’s a bit charitable to call it a “demo” because it’s kind of lame… but it turns out that version is only 8 bytes. That’s a pretty amazing 8 bytes!

I was curious how it worked, so I took a look at an updated version that’s been further optimized to be only 7 bytes long, and even fixes the screen not getting fully cleared.

It is of course a DOS .com file because there’s no way to approach that size otherwise. Ostensibly, this is the whole code, though as we’ll see later this isn’t the whole story:

DOS programs load at offset 0x100, with the segment registers all set to the same segment, and both the instruction pointer and SI pointing to 0x100.

The first instruction (LES) loads a 16:16 segment:offset from the memory pointed to by SI into ES:BX. In this case SI is pointing at the instruction itself, so it loads BX with 0x1cc4, and ES with the next two bytes, so ES = 0xab9f.

The next instruction is a LAHF, which loads the 8 bit flags register into AH (the top half of AX). The flags register starts as C0 Z0 S0 O0 A0 P0 D0 I1 T0 and isn’t affected by LES. So, AH is loaded with 0x02, and AX becomes 0x0200.

Next, the STOSW stores AX into ES:DI. Hmm. Well, AX is 0x0200. And ES:DI is 0xab9f:fffe. So, this time, we store 0x0200 into some random place in memory (possibly in the bitmap graphics area?). Not important, but harmless. Colour text video memory is mapped at 0xb8000, and eventually by repeating the STOSW which advances DI, we’ll get to DI=0xcc70 and so ES:DI will be ab9f:cc70 == 0xb8000, and we’ll start putting stuff on the screen. Conveniently 0x02 is the console attribute meaning bright green giving the nice “Matrix-y” colour.

Next, we XCHG CX,AX. CX = 0x00ff, so after the swap, CX=0x0200, AX=0x00ff. The top byte here is 0x00 which is black-on-black so the next STOSW will write some character, but it will effectively be clearing that character.

Now comes some magic: the JMP jumps to loop+1. That is, into the middle of the LES instruction. This is then decoded as “1c 9f”, which is “SBB AL, 0x9f”. This subtracts 0x9f from AL, which effectively randomizes AL, so we get the cycling letter pattern as we cycle through the loop, while maintaining the 0x02 in the top half of AX for the colour.

After the SBB, we STOSW, XCHG and JMP again. This time we write a black byte, next time we write green, and repeat. We’re still writing into random memory at this point, but eventually we get to 0xb8000, fill the screen, and then DI overflows back to 0 and we start again.

So, a summary of the bytes:

“C4 1C” is used in two different ways for code (LES, SBB), and as data as well (though this loaded data value is unimportant).

“9F” is the most amazingly reused byte: At first, it’s the very important LAHF which loads the colour into AH. Later, it’s the operand to the SBB instruction, and is prime, so cycles effectively through the character set to randomize the output. Finally, it’s loaded into the ES register as data along with 0xab to point more or less at video memory.

“AB” is used in two ways, as the STOSW that does the main work of filling video memory, but also as data for the top part of the ES register. This is quite serendipitous as there’s a relatively small range for the segment to be able to hit text video memory.

“91 EB FA” are regular code. The toggling between CX/AX is pretty clever to create vertical lines and of course the JMP causes the reinterpretation of LES to SBB.